End of Secrets
Page 9
He had two screens up, one for each of their live HawkEye profiles. She was on a downtown N train, reading unclassified e-mails on her smartphone. Jones noticed the way she took different trains each day, and sometimes cabs, and how she never walked the same route two days in a row. But however she got there, she almost always went directly home after she left the office. There she would usually log back into the Hawk network to do more work. The fiancé typically left his office much earlier in the evening and killed a few hours at a bar before going home.
Jones didn’t like watching her, yet he couldn’t always help it. A camera in the Prince Street station captured her disembarking from the train, and another showed her come up onto the sidewalk and turn east. There were no more cameras between the subway and her apartment, but ten minutes later the yellow HawkEye dot confirmed that she’d reached her address. The fiancé, HawkEye told him, was already home.
Jones turned his attention to the fiancé’s profile. It was a familiar compulsion, one that his smoldering resentment permitted him to indulge. He selected the date field and scrolled back to the previous week. He found the videos from the cameras at the Hotel Grand International in Dubai. He watched them in sequence, as he had many times since he’d first happened upon the footage. The cameras showed the fiancé leaving the ballroom with a young woman. They walked together to the elevator and then down the hallway to his room. When the door shut behind them, Jones killed the feed and closed out of HawkEye. He sat there for several minutes, letting the peaceful quiet of the Control Room calm his anger.
ELEVEN
First word of the mural came just before sunrise three days later. A jogger paused on the sidewalk and snapped a grainy, low-light picture of the side of the building, which was tweeted along with the words, LOL. MORNING, NEW YORKERS! Minutes later, a few more pictures emerged on Facebook news feeds and Twitter streams, and an initial report was established on Gnos.is. Within a half hour, the uploading of pictures to social networking sites had become nearly continuous, spurred on by a swelling group of commuters who had gathered on the sidewalk beneath the mural. Bloggers supplied web page upon web page of commentary. The Gnos.is report grew, becoming richer and richer with photos, videos, and user-generated copy. Then it began getting serious traffic. By eight the mural was the top-trending story on the site.
Kera stepped onto an uptown R train at 8:17 AM and stood against the doors so that she could check her e-mail on her phone without anyone peering over her shoulder. There was a message from Gabby requesting that Kera and Jones set aside time for a daily meeting with her to provide updates on the ATLANTIS case. There was a reply from Detective Hopper, in response to an e-mail Kera had sent asking for an update. His message—that Rowena Pete’s bank accounts had been quiet since her disappearance—was predictably useless. Nice of him to send that along a week into the investigation. It was the sort of thing HawkEye could determine in a fraction of a second. But then again, Hopper didn’t know about HawkEye, and he thought Kera was a journalist who was too clueless to track down information on her own. The detective also confirmed that the NYPD had received no word from any captor about a ransom, adding that they were now well outside the crucial forty-eight-hour window in which they had their best chances of finding a missing person. The only thing Kera found interesting about Hopper’s e-mail was that he did not seem to presume that Rowena Pete was dead. There apparently was too little evidence even for that. As he always did, he echoed the little phrase that had appeared in all his communications with her and that she thought was plainly ridiculous, given the circumstances: there is no sign of foul play.
A fragment of conversation from across the car reached her ears and pulled her attention away from Hopper’s e-mail. She looked up. The two men who were talking stood braced against the doors directly across from her. Both wore skinny jeans and T-shirts. One had a tattoo on his neck and piercings in his ears, nose, and over one eye. They were huddled together around a tablet. It was difficult to hear what they were saying over the cacophony of ads that, for a few prime hours each morning and evening, assaulted rush-hour commuters with a ferocious cross fire of flashing screens synched with voice-overs and music. She slid between two commuters to get closer, still pretending to be engrossed in her e-mail as she eavesdropped.
“It’s gotta be It, right? Anyone else would claim credit.”
“That thing looks massive. It can’t be one person.”
“Who knows.”
“I’m sorry, but is that a new one?” asked a girl nearby who had also picked up on their conversation.
“Yeah, just this morning,” said the guy holding the tablet. He tilted it so that she could get a look.
“Where is this?” she asked.
“Hold on a second. I just read that . . .” The guy began scrolling. Kera waited. She couldn’t see the screen.
“Looks like Franklin and Varick. In Tribeca.”
The train decelerated and lurched to a stop under the Flatiron building at Twenty-Third Street. A fresh hoard of commuters pressed in on them. Kera hesitated, walking herself through the motions of having second thoughts. But she knew she would go. She’d known it as soon as she’d heard them speak of the new mural. She pushed shoulder-first through the onboarding crowd and, moving with difficulty against traffic, broke free onto the platform just as the doors slid shut.
The 1 train was two blocks west. She covered the distance at a near run and stood on the downtown platform, winded, peering up the tunnel and willing the headlights of a train to curve into view. After two minutes light played against the tunnel walls, and then the train swung into sight. She rode impatiently near the door, gripping a handrail as the train lurched its way toward the southern tip of Manhattan. The crowds thinned below Houston Street. She got off two stops later, at Franklin. A bottleneck slowed her on the stairs, and it was then, even before she reached street level, that she first sensed the pandemonium above.
Car horns and sirens echoed through the canyon maze of buildings overhead. When she finally reached the sidewalk, her eyes easily found the source of the commotion.
The mural covered the middle three floors of an eight-story apartment building kitty-corner across the intersection. She wasn’t an art critic, but if she had to categorize the style of the mural she was looking at, the words that came to mind were “provocative mock realism.” The image made it appear as if a large swath of the building’s outer wall had been blown away, exposing what lay within. In the foreground was a network of crisscrossing septic pipes, clearly burdened with a heavy load. Kera thought they looked a little like prison-cell bars. Trapped beyond the pipes were individual apartment units, in which people ate and bathed and defecated and fucked, one on top of the other, a compartmentalized tower of humanity imprisoned within its cage of piped sewage. There was something both playful and profound about the depiction, and Kera, standing in a crowd on the sidewalk with her head tilted back, was surprised to hear herself laugh out loud like some sort of madwoman.
The mural had thrown half of lower Manhattan into chaos. Mobs of onlookers swelled against hastily erected police barriers, crippling the intersection. Cops waved furiously at the jammed traffic, ushering rubbernecking motorists through and hollering empty threats at streams of jaywalkers. Kera skirted the mob at the base of the mural and stood farther back to take in the scene from a wider perspective. There was the painting itself, striking in its vivid detail and amusing in its voyeurism. But what she’d really come to examine was the feat of the production. Where had this mural come from? Its existence felt like a taunt.
The building, Kera began to see, was a perfect target for the stunt. There were no windows on the wall, which had previously butted up against an adjacent structure, long since torn down and replaced with the small, fenced-in parking lot that charged twenty-two dollars an hour for valet parking. The windowless wall provided a clean, vast canvas, and the parking lot provided a buffer between the wall and the street, where at night curtains of l
ight must have hung from the infrequent street lamps, cutting off a view of everything in the shadows.
Kera shifted her eyes between the corners of nearby buildings. She could see just three cameras, all of them trained on the buildings’ entrances. The awning of the parking lot’s valet hut also sported a low-budget camera, but it was aimed at the cash register. Drawing her eyes to the roofline, she swept them back and forth. No obvious sign of how the artist might have suspended him- or herself into position. She could speculate about rappelling devices, but it would be only that—speculation. Without surveillance footage or physical evidence, looking at the mural provided her with no greater insight about its origins than if she’d come upon Michelangelo’s ceiling—had it appeared suddenly overnight and without the permission of the Sistine Chapel.
She pulled out her smartphone and took a dozen pictures of the scene. Then she dialed Jones’s workstation in the Control Room. “Have you seen this?” she said when he answered.
“Seen what? Where are you?”
“It. The artist. A mural appeared overnight on the side of a building in Tribeca. I thought I’d come by and have a look for myself.”
“Forget the mural, Kera. Get back here. HawkEye identified a POI.”
Gabby stood over Jones with folded arms. He was showing her the HawkEye map with the clusters of dots when Gabby turned to acknowledge Kera’s arrival with a look that was one part concern for her disheveled appearance, and two parts scorn for her being late.
“Everything OK?”
“Eventful commute. What’s up?” Kera said.
“J. D. was just walking me through a very detailed explanation of how our computers recognize patterns. He was, I hope, about to get to the point.”
Kera could see Jones clench his jaw, but he continued. “Using HawkEye, we discovered that all four of our missing subjects were at the Empire Hotel in the weeks leading up to their disappearances. But we don’t think any of them were there at the same time. Which means . . .” He looked at Kera.
“They had to have been there for something—or someone—else. That’s what I was hoping to find when I went up there last night,” Kera said.
She braced herself for a reprimand from Gabby. Venturing into the field without permission was prohibited. But Gabby only said, “And?”
“I looked around, talked to a bartender named Erica.” Kera shook her head. “She knew something. She was working when Rowena Pete was in there last month, and I think she was being coy about who the singer was having drinks with. But my gut says she doesn’t know the full picture. What’ve you got?”
“While you were at the bar last night, I reprogrammed a few of the queries I use to pull data out of HawkEye,” Jones said. “You both know the basics of our surveillance software. It can identify faces as well as flag specific objects or traits, like a piece of luggage left alone for too long on a subway platform or, say, people wearing blue shirts, that sort of thing. But it can also be programmed to detect more abstract patterns. For example, you can isolate a single camera and look at, say, weekdays from 0800 hours to 0900 hours. The software begins to recognize people over time and can sort out who’s there routinely and who’s never been ID’d there before.” Jones looked up to see if they were following. They both nodded. “Between our four subjects, we had fifteen confirmed sightings at the hotel. And we have this.” On a different monitor, he pulled up the feed from a surveillance camera. Kera recognized the location immediately. It was a clear view of the sidewalk outside the main entrance of the Empire Hotel. “Using the time stamps from those fifteen confirmed sightings, I wrote a quick program that would look for general facial-recog patterns across a period of one hour on either side of each of those sightings.”
“Any hits?” Kera asked.
“Yep. The Empire Hotel has three full-time doormen. Our camera here became familiar enough with them to know when they worked overtime or missed a shift.” Kera’s heart sank. They weren’t looking for doormen. “It also identified three front-desk attendants, a concierge, and a dozen bartenders, chefs, waiters, and cleaning personnel.”
“Can I see some of the footage? I can ID the bartender I spoke to,” Kera said. It was unlikely that any of the doormen or lobby staff had a connection to their case, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that her questions about Rowena Pete had meant something to Erica.
“I think the bartender’s only role here is that she shows up for work like all the rest of the staff.”
“You said you had a person of interest,” Kera said.
“We do.” Jones was not someone who grinned, but Kera could hear the equivalent of that in his voice. He pulled up a series of screenshots from the surveillance cameras. The same man appeared in each of them. “Here’s the needle HawkEye lifted out of the haystack. He was at the hotel each time one of our subjects was spotted there.”
“Holy shit,” Kera said.
“Can you ID him?” Gabby asked.
“Of course. The software builds a 3-D faceprint using hundreds of different identifying values, such as the distance between the eyes, or the depth of hollowness around the eyes and cheeks, and even something as nuanced as skin tone. If the camera can catch a clear view of a subject’s face, it compares that to faceprints in our available databases—”
“For Christ’s sake, spare me the details,” Gabby said.
“The ID is a match for a guy named Charlie Canyon.”
“Not staff?” Kera asked.
“Definitely not staff.”
“Not missing?”
“Nope. Mr. Canyon is alive and well at last check. He’s an account director at a boutique PR agency in Hell’s Kitchen. Interestingly, personal details get sketchy beyond that. He’s gone pretty far out of his way to lighten his digital footprint. No social networking, no search engine results other than his employee profile on his firm’s website. It’s redaction city when it comes to his online identity.”
“That’s not easy to do,” Kera said, glancing at Jones.
Jones shrugged. “Privacy’s not a crime. I actually kind of admire the purity in that.”
Kera stared at the frozen image on-screen, wishing she had a better view of the man’s eyes behind his sunglasses. “So this Canyon guy covers his tracks pretty well. And yet you still found him.”
“Well, it’s the twenty-first century. A guy walks into a bar, he’s gonna be on camera.”
Gabby jumped in here. “What are the chances this is a coincidence? That he’s not just a frequent patron of the hotel bar?”
Kera shook her head. She didn’t even need to do the math. “No chance at all. Not if we can put him there for every single one of these visits.”
Jones looked up at Kera. “Want to hear the best part? Guess where he was on the night of June 12 of last year?”
“You’re kidding,” Kera said, seeing in his face that he wasn’t.
“Where?” Gabby said. “What are you talking about?” Using the map, Jones explained how the four missing subjects had been detected in the industrial blocks between the Meatpacking District and the West Side Highway—all on the same night back in June. Jones pulled up the map and pointed to two new yellow dots, representing the points where Charlie Canyon was ID’d entering the neighborhood and then exiting it several hours later.
Gabby stood thinking for a moment before she said, “OK, that’s good enough for me. I want you to start round-the-clock surveillance on this guy. For now, just use the computers. No stakeouts or tails, and not a word gets out to NYPD or the Feds. Understood? Just use HawkEye to track him. We can’t have this guy disappearing into thin air like the others.”
Jones nodded. Gabby turned to Kera.
“Get into this guy’s life. Find out who he is, where he goes, what he spends money on, what connection he has to our subjects—everything. OK?”
“I can do that, yes. But this guy, Charlie Canyon, he’s an American citizen.”
“So what? What are you saying, Agent Mersal?”
“We haven’t asked a judge,” Gabby said, clearly offended more by the insubordination than the basis of Kera’s complaint. “And I haven’t asked for your legal opinion. Your job is to analyze data available to you. If you have access to surveillance of Mr. Canyon, I damn well expect you to use it.”
“I understand. But, with respect, we’re talking about an investigation of missing persons, not counterterrorism. Do we even have reason to think a crime has been committed?”
“You haven’t the faintest idea of the full parameters of this investigation. That’s why you take orders from me. And I’ve just ordered you to carry out full surveillance of this target, indefinitely, until I order you to stop. Is that clear, Agent Mersal?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. The three of us will meet with Branagh at the end of the week. Find me something worth talking about in that meeting.”
Kera watched Gabby go. She didn’t exhale until the Control Room door shut behind her. Gabby wanted them to meet with Director Branagh? About this?
“Was I out of line?” she said to Jones.
“I’m not a lawyer, remember?”
“Yeah, but you have common sense, don’t you? And decency. You’re not here for this kind of thing, right?” When he didn’t answer, she turned to look at him. “Jones? Did you take this job—did you develop HawkEye—to spy on Americans who haven’t been charged with any crime?”
Jones didn’t look up, but he’d stopped working. For a long moment he was silent, his hands hovering over the keypad. Finally, very calmly, he said, “You have no right to question why I’m here.” Then he added, a little more softly, “Do me a favor and don’t get yourself fired, OK?”